But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of of the garden [1], God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
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We are the descendents of Eve. We have eaten of the apple. And we know good and evil, so we should be gods. And yet, good and evil persist, and now, in this modern age, we can take photographs of it being perpetrated in our name, and still, we do not see
There are new photographs at Salon [3] today. Photographs of men being humiliated and tortured in our name. We will look. Some of us will turn away, horrified. Some of us will flinch in recognition of the pain. Some will laugh, call it fraternity pranks.
I weep in frustration and rage. Why do the photographs not immediately cause 300 million people to call to an immediate end to the horror that is Iraq? Why do we not rail and rage and take to the streets?
Who you calling we, kemosabe?
"No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain."
Susan Sontag [4] Regarding the Pain of
Others [5]
What does it take to get a person to not only see, but to feel and respond to another's pain? And how does one represent pain? Pain is the great leveler. It destroys language. It strips us of meaning.
World, self, and voice are lost, or nearly lost, through the intense pain of torture and not through the confession as is wrongly suggested by its connotations of betrayal. The prisoner's confession merely objectifies the fact of their being almost lost, makes their invisible absence, or nearly absence, visible to the torturers. To assent to words that through the thick agony of the body can be only dimly heard, or to reach aimlessly for the name of a person or a place that has barely enough cohesion to hold its shape as a word and none to bond it to its worldly referent, is a way of saying, yes, all is almost gone now, there is almost nothing left now, even this voice, the sounds I am making, no longer form my words but the words of another.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain [6]
And so, unable to convey suffering in words, we try touching one another through the other senses. We cannot smell, taste, or touch through the Internet. We use photographs, thinking that surely this will make a difference. And yet, it doesn't. Over and over again, each generation will post photographs of burning children, bombed-out villages, destroyed lives, tortured souls, and we will look and look and nothing will change.
Why? Is it because ultimately, we see something noble in the photographs? Do we see suffering but think to ourselves that the suffering will be redeemed? It is the great American myth, isn't it? That ultimately, pain has meaning? That those who suffer will be comforted? That the evil will be punished? Is this what allows us to sleep at night?
Do I blame religion for that? Nietzsche [7] did:
Religion and the religious significance of life bring the brilliance of the sun onto such constantly troubled men and make looking at themselves bearable. Religion works just as an Epicurean philosophy usually works on suffering people of a higher rank—refreshing and, as it were, refining and exploiting the suffering, finally even blessing and justifying it. In Christianity and Buddhism there is perhaps nothing so venerable as their art of teaching even the most abject people to place themselves, through their piety, into an illusory higher order of things and thus to hang onto their satisfaction with the real order, in the middle of which their life is hard enough—and this hardness is precisely what's necessary.
Do we accept that suffering is part of life and therefore, extreme cases of suffering are just part of the great cycle?
Why can't I accept that today?
So, what do I do? I write. Words. Meaningless fucking words in an attempt to make myself feel better. To find some community here, to find someone to share my pain, to express a similar outrage, to demand that something--anything--change.
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